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Government servers broke because they didn’t expect Brexit to go viral – the Kardashian IT team can fix that

They should have spoken to PAPER, the magazine that hosted Kim Kardashian's naked bum picture. The publication installed four front end servers and an extra server to share a filesystem between them for the big event. One IT upgrade wouldn’t have hurt the government website

Kirsty Major
Wednesday 08 June 2016 13:27 BST
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Kim Kardashian-West winning her Webby Break the Internet award
Kim Kardashian-West winning her Webby Break the Internet award

I am so over Brexit. When once I felt excitement about the greatest democratic event of my life so far, I now feel paralysing apathy. I walk past newspapers in supermarkets, take one look at the headlines and forget who I am, what I came to buy and what the point in carrying on is anymore.

You know all sense of rationality has been lost in a debate when someone chooses to employ reductio ad Hitlerum, as Boris Johnson chose to do. It is time for everyone to just call it a day and get this thing over with.

This, I hope, was the sentiment that drove the surge of traffic that broke the gov.uk/register-to-vote website before the midnight deadline. The Cabinet Office said it was due to “unprecedented demand”. In short, the Government failed to prepare for the half a million people who applied to vote, the volume of users overwhelmed the servers and crashed the website.

If the Cabinet spokesperson had have been straight up, he might instead have said: “Look, we didn’t realise democracy would, like, go viral. We weren’t ready for it. But we are talking to Kim Kardashian’s people to figure out how they handled the naked bum situation and hopefully we’ll have some tech tricks up our sleeves next time around.”

Seriously though, they would have done well too check in with Paper, the magazine who brought the world the naked pictures of Kimmy K. Before launching the now infamous edition, the small indie publication went to their web company and said: “We may get a lot of traffic." In response they installed pre-warmed load balancers, four front end servers and an extra server to share a filesystem between them and an additional content delivery network. All for one not so little bum. The least the Government could have done for people’s democratic rights was to get the contact details of these people (here they are incidentally, to prove it isn’t that hard). Hopefully, they’ll be prepared this time around, after the Government announced that the deadline had been extended until midnight on Thursday.

The calamity sets realistic expectations on calls for voting to be taken online. The estimate is that online voting would boost overall turnout to 79 per cent with an extra nine million voters. If the Government website couldn’t handle half a million requests in the space of an hour, imagine the chaos with around 46,420,413 voters (the number of people who turned out in 2015), plus an extra nine million to boot.

The real tragedy is that over half of those registering to vote yesterday were people under 35. Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said: “People might have seen the debate last night and wanted to register, that is valid. It seems many trying to register were young people. It would be a travesty if their first experience of democracy was this shambles.” With most young people being likely to vote remain, this is sure to have an impact on what will inevitably be a close contest.

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